An excerpt from Pipa:

‘What is trauma? How has Covid Lockdown affected us? Collectively have we experienced a traumatic event? How do we heal? How do we define big trauma v little trauma? Is yours worse than your neighbours? How do you know if you even carry trauma? Most likely you do, and in this episode you will discover how to find out – a shortcut is asking yourself whether or not you ever feel that you aren’t good enough.

In this episode I am joined by Lucinda Lennox, trauma therapist from The Recovery Centre in London. She says, “most of what weighs us down, isn’t ours to carry” and that trauma from various life events causes us to build up barriers which prevent us from finding ourselves and living OUR lives. We talk about trauma, what it is, how it affects our lives and whether or not it is possible to break free from its shackles.

Big T and little t trauma – what is the difference? There’s the large events that cause trauma, for example a sudden death, witnessing a traumatic event, rape, being in a war or seeing perhaps the effect of violence and war by nature of being somewhere it is happening right in front of you. There’s also the little t trauma, the absent parent, the mother that doesn’t show love. There’s then another, Generational Trauma and we discuss how it gets passed through our DNA – it’s fascinating stuff.’

Please click on this link to listen to the podcast: PODCAST

Author:

Lucinda Gordon Lennox

The post Big T, Little T Trauma (Podcast) appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

There has been much talk in the press in the past year about the rise in mental illness in young people.

The chatter is that this rise has coincided with the rise of social media and screen use, and the two seem to have been linked together.

In an August 2018 article in the New Scientist, Tom Chivers made the point that, actually, there is no evidence to support that there is a direct link between self-harm and social media, and went on to say that alcohol and cannabis use has reduced during that same period of time—yet no one is drawing the conclusion that reduction in substance use is because of a rise in social media and screen time.

The problem is more complex than that—and yet it is actually more simple at the same time. The New Scientist points out that “exactly what is causing this unhappiness is not clear.”

What exactly is causing this unhappiness is, in fact, more clear than we think, and it is largely due to an ocean of misunderstanding around the topic of trauma.

Because underneath almost all mental ill-health is unresolved trauma.

When we think of trauma, most of us think of war veterans coming home and not being able to integrate into normal life again. Or we think of someone being raped, or being in a terrorist attack. And this is indeed trauma, it is indeed traumatic. And often, people suffer for some time afterward as a result, especially if they don’t seek professional help.

This type of trauma, the more widely known trauma, we call “Big T Trauma” and it’s technically defined as something happening to us where we feel that our physical life is in danger.

Some of the patients at TRC have “Big T Trauma.” But what we are finding is that almost all of our patients have another type of trauma. It is called developmental trauma, or “little t trauma.” And it happens during the first 18 years of our lives—during our childhoods, during our developmental years. And herein lies the ocean of misunderstanding to which I referred above.

There is a notion that “trauma happens to other people.” This notion is incorrect. We actually all have some trauma, some developmental trauma. Some of us have more of it than others, but we all have some.

Bessel van der Kolk, one of the leading trauma researchers in the world, in his book, ‘The body Keeps the Score’, calls developmental trauma a “hidden epidemic.” And he is right; it is hidden, and it is an epidemic. Bessel talks about children who have been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused. And he puts them on the map. Thank you, Bessel.

We can probably all—however horrid it might sound—imagine a child who has been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused. We can picture them, perhaps curled in on themselves, pale, thin—“traumatised.” They might have been born to parents who are active addicts or alcoholics. They might have been beaten, sworn at, and shouted at daily, with their basic needs not even being met. As we think more about these poor children, we can understand that they would have trauma, developmental trauma, the “little t trauma,” and our hearts might bleed for them.

But those people self-harming in the reported statistics aren’t necessarily born into families with that level of dysfunction.

So what is going on?

There is a gaping hole in the true understanding of emotional abuse and neglect, that’s what’s going on.

For decades, for generations, we have been emotionally abused and neglected by our parents, to one degree or another, without anyone realising that it is happening.

No parent sets out to emotionally abuse and neglect their child. Well, perhaps a teeny 0.01 percent do. Every parent I have ever met sincerely believes that how they raise their children is absolutely the best for their child. And they most likely believe that how they were raised was also from a place of putting the children first. No one is perfect—lord forbid, that would bring its own set of problems for a child.

But let’s just look at this notion of emotional abuse and neglect so we can see where we ourselves might have missed out, so that we can see where our own developmental trauma might lie.

To keep it simple, I look at it in terms of the emotional needs of any child. One of my trainers, Laurel Parnell, encapsulates this need-bank in terms of 4Ss, which are: Seen, Soothed, Safe, and Secure. In order for a child to emerge as an adult with a minimum amount of developmental trauma, they need to have felt those 4Ss enough of the time during their childhood.

Let’s think back to our own childhood. Did we receive those 4Ss enough of the time?

Did we feel seen by our parents? By seen, I mean really connected with for who we were as an individual, rather than just a family member, or an offspring. Did we have a parent who would take the time to get to know us, to hear our opinion, to value to it, and to value us?

Were we soothed when we felt upset? Did we have a parent who would scoop us up in their arms when we felt sad or emotional, embrace us, rock us, and soothe us until our upset subsided. Or were we told to get on with it and stop crying? “Big girls don’t cry, boys don’t cry.”

Did we feel emotionally safe to go to our parents with anything that was going on in our lives that felt difficult? If we tried to do that, did they listen, see us, and hear us? Or did we receive a message—said or unsaid—that we just needed to get on with it alone? Generally, if we feel seen and soothed, we are probably going to feel emotionally safe.

Did we feel secure? Did we have a stable home that felt like somewhere we could go back to, that felt like home, that we could share with our friends, where we had a sense of security?

Many of us, when we take an honest look at the above, will answer “No, I did not.”

If we didn’t feel enough of those 4Ss enough of the time, then we are going to have some developmental trauma.

So how does this manifest in our daily lives as we grow up? What does it look like? Depending on our personalities, our character makeup, and the type or frequency of the trauma, there are various ways this developmental trauma manifests in us. PTSD, alcoholism, addictions, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, smoking, antisocial behaviour, numbness, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and of course suicide itself, are some of these ways.

All of these are signs of developmental trauma. Because trauma doesn’t just come from the horrid things that happen to us, it also comes from the loving things that didn’t happen for us.

But we all love our children, right? Of course we do. And we were loved by our parents before us too. All parents love their children. But the missing piece is that we don’t all know how to be unconditionally loving toward our children because we don’t fully understand exactly what all children need.

Because it’s not just about love. It is also about respect.

And when we do not feel seen, soothed, safe, or secure enough of the time, we are not being respected for the extraordinary human being that we are, in all of its wholeness. A lack of that respect and unconditional love, very sadly, results in the child feeling emotionally abused or neglected.

We need to be looking at everyone, from a young child, to teenagers, to young adults, to grown adults—the “little t trauma” affects all of us.

And instead of asking the question “What is wrong with this person,” we need to be asking the question “what happened to this person?”

Because the answer lies somewhere in those 4Ss—or lack thereof. And once we know that, we can help them to heal.

Author: Lucinda Gordon Lennox

The post Are we asking the Wrong Questions about Mental Health? appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

We’re 3 weeks into the new year and I wonder how many people who have set resolutions are still keeping to them.

It’s tough keeping new resolutions if we have unresolved trauma – and the old habit that we were trying to break was in fact a self-protective measure put in place as a band aid for our trauma.⁠

What can typically then happen is we berate ourselves and shame ourselves for not managing to break the pattern and we just end up feeling even worse. 

Even after we have done trauma work, we still might be left needing to break a habit. ⁠

I wonder if we can resolve to try some of the following:⁠

1. It’s ok if I don’t keep my resolutions because it’s too difficult⁠ and the habits I’ve been trying to break are tied to a deeper emotional reason that I haven’t addressed yet.

2. If we are trying to begin new, more healthy behaviours, can we set ourselves small goals instead of punitive big ones?⁠

3. Can we set an intention rather than a resolution. “This year I intend to stop smoking” or “this year I intend to eat healthily”. We can put a post it note up to remind us of the intention. ⁠

4. Can we ask for help with behaviours we want to change that just feel too difficult to change on our own. Once we’ve decided we want to change, often the next step is being ready to receive help from others. ⁠

5. Could we think about trauma therapy as an option to really understand and shift our internal wounds that are causing us to behave in maladaptive ways that we now find dysfunctional and that we want to change.

6. Can we be kind to ourselves. We have started the year in lockdown (in the U.K. at least). This is tough stuff for many people. Can we be gentle, kind, loving and accepting of ourselves, wherever we are at. ⁠

Author: Lucinda Gordon Lennox

Trauma Specialist MSc (Reg MBACP, FDAP Accred)

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The post Resolutions & Intentions for the New Year appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

For a while now I have been writing about how mental illness is not about what is wrong with that person, it is much more about “what happened to that person”. ⁠⁠

Every “maladaptive behaviour” – essentially any state we are in when we are classified as “mentally ill”, is almost always a web of self-protective measures that we have unconsciously put in place because something happened – or didn’t happen that should have, to us. They are a result of our felt experiences. This is often when we were growing up in our first 7 years of life when our neural pathways are connecting for the first time, but can also be because of a big life event that we haven’t processed. ⁠
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When a situation is too much, or too soon, for us to handle, we unconsciously develop a protective layer, or layers, or protective mechanisms, in order to survive. 

Anxiety: a state that keeps us in a state of “flight” to keep us away from the same experience that caused our anxiety from the start.⁠⁠
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OCD: ditto above – OCD thoughts are protecting us from feeling that underbelly of overwhelm that feels too much to handle on our own.⁠⁠
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Dependencies: methods of soothing those parts of us that we have dissociated from, so we don’t feel the emotional pain, in order that we can survive. ⁠⁠
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Eating disorders or disordered eating: again, a self-protective measure that keeps us protected from feeling the hideous feelings underneath, that will likely (and hopefully) emerge as we try to eat nourishing food for our bodies. ⁠⁠
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Depression: a deep protective layer that keeps us from facing life because it feels safer to feel depressed than to turn up to life which feels scary and shameful. ⁠
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⁠⁠Narcissism: a deep feeling around shame in our core that we cover up at all costs with lies, manipulations and dismissals as soon as we get a sense people might see our shame and unworthiness. 

Some of these self-protective measures can massively hinder our lives and those of the people around us. But we are not “ill”, we are just governed and overtaken by our attempts to stay safe and protected from the world.⁠⁠

And then there is people-pleasing (covering up shame around not being enough), being a doormat (ditto people pleasing above, fear of confrontation (a protector part at work to keep us feeling safe), smoking (it is not safe to be vulnerable). 

Perfectionism: an inability to love ourselves for exactly who we are and to be vulnerable and make mistakes because then our imperfection will be “found out” and we will feel shame. 

All of these measures work for us for a while – that is why we choose them, albeit unconsciously!

But we can heal them. We can release them. We can lessen their power over them. We don’t need them to be running our lives.

Author: Lucinda Gordon Lennox

Trauma Specialist MSc (Reg MBACP, FDAP Accred)

The post Understanding Mental Illness appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

Lucinda Gordon-Lennox, TRC London, explains why so much of the pain we are carrying simply is not ours – so why is this? How is it that we carry the unprocessed pain of our parents, grandparents and beyond?

As soon as we are conceived – and definitely through to the age of 2 years old, our pre-frontal cortex, our rational/logical decision-making brain – is simply not formed. It is not yet ‘online’; this means that we are emotional sponges.

And there is a very high probability that our parents will carry unresolved pain inside them. And when this is the case, there is a very high chance we will pick up on it. At this young age we don’t have the cognitive or emotional capacity to work out “this is Mum’s stuff not mine”, so we absorb it as our own. And it becomes part of our own pain. ⁠

Sometimes during trauma work we might go back into the womb – very often here we have picked up on Mum’s stuff. Perhaps her anxiety makes us feel unsafe. Perhaps her unprocessed grief makes us feel as though we don’t want to be born because it all feels too painful. ⁠

Sometimes too, during trauma work, we work directly on the Mum or Dad interject (thoughts, beliefs/feelings of those around us that we unconsciously adopt when we are children, taking them on as though they are ours). By doing this, we are not doing Mum or Dad’s trauma work for them, but we are able to release our own felt experience if their stuff that has become lodged in us. ⁠

Of course we carry our own pain from our own lives and our own relational misalignments and traumas. But if we feel we have looked at this and processed this – and we still don’t feel that wonderful, I wonder if it’s time to look beyond our own trauma and to that of our parents and beyond; there is a high chance we are carrying that too. ⁠

And we can release it. ⁠

Author: Lucinda Gordon-Lennox

Trauma Specialist MSc (Reg MBACP, FDAP Accred)

The post So much of the pain we are carrying simply is not ours appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

This is the second post in a Trauma series by Lucinda.

Post 1: The Brain’s Response to Trauma

Big T vs Little t

When we are looking at and assessing trauma, we divide it into two categories: Big T Trauma and Little t Trauma. However, neither one of these is bigger than the other despite what their name implies. Essentially a Big T Trauma is a situation in which we feel our physical life is in danger: a car crash, terrorist attack, natural disaster, being kidnapped, being physically assaulted. Alternatively, Big T could be when our emotional state is threatened so violently that, in that moment, it feels overwhelming; sexual abuse, death of a loved one, bullying, witnessing a suicide or homicide.

Little t Trauma on the other hand occurs during our childhood and is when our emotional safety is threatened. This could look like being shamed, being compared unfavourably to our peers, being over indulged, being under indulged, having emotionally absent parents, or not being encouraged to grow into who we really are as an individual.

For a child to feel emotionally abandoned by a parent is just as painful being physically abused – sometimes even more so. And abandonment trauma is one of the most prolific little t traumas that there is.

For both sets of traumas, Big T and Little t, the physiological process in the brain is exactly the same.  It is these unresolved “stuck” memories and feelings that constitute the trauma that affects us as we grow older.

It Hurts Like Hell

So why don’t we look at this trauma and process it automatically?

Think about what it’s like to be threatened with a gun or a knife, or to witness a terrorist attack, or to be sexually assaulted, or to be hit, or to be bullied, or to feel in our core that our mother does not love us, or to feel that we are not important or special or loved.

It hurts like hell, right? And this is one of the reasons we don’t look at our trauma. It feels way safer to bury it instead. So instead of facing it and processing it, we unconsciously protect ourselves from it by hiding it away.

But when we bury our feelings, we need pick up behaviours to keep the feelings buried, and these behaviours are generally pretty maladaptive. This is where the symptoms of trauma come in. We have a drink, we smoke a cigarette, we go shopping. We reach for something external.

These external vices have a soothing effect, and it is easier to feel soothed by something external than it is to soothe ourselves – especially if we were not suitably soothed when we were little.  By doing all of this, we are unconsciously preventing old hurts from coming up. We want – we need – to keep them hidden, in order that we can function in our day-to-day lives.

Another way we keep things buried is by changing our behaviours to avoid old hurts. For example, we might people-please when confrontation feels too difficult. Or we might become grandiose when we don’t want anyone to see that we feel useless inside.

All of these are signs and symptoms of unresolved trauma from the past – Big T, or Little t, or both. And trauma can be healed.

Trauma healing can be anything from EMDR, AF-EMDR, AI-EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Trauma-informed CBT, Kundalini Yoga, or Analytical Hypnotherapy to name but a few.

Most of the time, when we have suffered trauma – Big T or Little t, we have not had a sufficient support network available to process it at the time, and we have felt unseen and unheard. More often than not, this lack of others giving us what we need is why our difficult experiences don’t get processed.

This is why we need a compassionate witness. We need someone to see through our pain to our beauty underneath it, and to hold that space for us whilst we discover it for ourselves. Having someone, such a therapist, to help process and understand this pain is the first step to be free from it.

Author: Lucinda Gordon-Lennox

Trauma Specialist MSc (Reg MBACP, FDAP Accred)

The post What is Trauma? appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

All of us, to one degree or another, are carrying at least some unresolved trauma from the past. Every time we reach for something external to make us feel better – we are seeking to soothe a past trauma.

Whether it be drinking every evening, hiding from work, constant snacking, over-eating, under-eating, smoking, self-harm, people-pleasing, over-shopping, being a doormat, narcissism or an inability to keep healthy boundaries – this is trauma is playing out in our subconscious.

Flight. Flight, Freeze or Flop

Every living animal or human has an inbuilt threat detector in the brain; it is there to prevent us from being killed; it’s called the amygdala. When this threat detector is activated – when our brain detects a threat – adrenalin is sent through the body to enable us to escape from the danger.

This is the fight or flight response: I either fight the threat, or I run away.

If our brain realises that fighting or fleeing is futile, then it will send us into a freeze response where we feel immobile. Think ‘rabbit in the headlights.

Now this is all well and good if we are an animal in the wild. Or, if we have a lion hurtling towards us. Amazing – we’ll flee (hopefully), or we’ll stay rooted to the spot and it will think we’re a tree.

In other words, the threat detector is perfect when there is a threat of physical danger, because it unconsciously works to get us away from that danger.

However, as humans, the amygdala also detects emotional threats.

And this is where it can get messy.

When we are threatened emotionally, our brain performs the exact same process as if the threat were physical.

So, if we are young and we are being shouted at, we’ll detect danger, or a threat, and we’ll go into fight, flight or freeze.

If we are being bullied at school: ditto.

If we are a highly sensitive child and our parents are frequently emotionally absent: ditto.

If we are shamed as a child (compared with our peers, told off in public, told we are lazy, told we are not good enough, had family expectations put upon us) then ditto again. There is another trauma response – this is “flop” or submit. This trauma response is generally learned when traumatic events are repeated, over time and we have unconsciously given up hope of anything changing. So we bypassed fight, flight and freeze – and immediately go into “flop”.

The Pre-frontal Cortex

Another thing that happens when we go into fight, flight or freeze, is our pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for rational thought, decision making, and problem solving – is taken off-line.

Again, this is essential in helping us get away from a lion hurtling towards us in time, in order that all physiological efforts can be directed towards not being killed by the lion, because in that moment, we do not need to think; if we did think then we would probably be killed.

But our rational brain goes offline with emotional threats too. Not so helpful.

The Left Brain Function

The absence of left-brain function at the time of trauma, is the main reason that trauma becomes stuck.  

Unless we realise pretty darn quickly that the threat is gone, then that left brain won’t come back online in time for the trauma to be processed. And the event will stay stuck.

As children, our left brain only starts to be used around the age of three and is not fully developed until we are in our early 20s. So, as you can imagine, there is ample opportunity for material to remain stuck and unprocessed from our childhoods.

If we are not trauma informed, then it is entirely out of our control whether we manage to process a trauma or not. Traumatic events are scary, and the panic and fear around feeling scared is often lumped on top – meaning we’ll stay in the trauma response even longer.

The longer we remain in the trauma response at the time, the more likely it is that the trauma will not be processed, because the left brain just won’t come back online again. And for a child, unless a parent or other adult performs the calming, soothing safety-bringing words and actions of the left brain – and this really is not understood well enough at all – then a child doesn’t stand a chance of having their trauma processed.

Threat detection and the subsequent trauma response is an unconscious, physiological process in the brain and the body, which is designed to protect us in a situation that has threatened us either physically or emotionally.

Take a look at my recent article “Covid-19 is a Collective Trauma” for tips on keeping trauma responses at bay during these times.

Author: Lucinda Gordon-Lennox

Trauma Specialist MSc (Reg MBACP, FDAP Accred)

The post The Brain’s Response to Trauma appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.

Yes we can. By healing our inter-generational trauma. 

We carry the trauma of our abusers, parents, grandparents and beyond. This is through nature (epigenetics) and nurture (how we were treated by the significant adults around us).

In addition to this, we carry parental introjects. These are the thoughts and beliefs that our parents carried that we absorbed as our own, as a baby, through mirroring. These introjects can be helpful of course: love, kindness, warmth; but they can also be harmful: anxiety, depression, self-hatred etc. 

We can work directly on both the introjects, and the generational trauma, using AF-EMDR, and we can actually heal – and yes, we can even feel compassion for our abusers.

I remember my first experience of this. Stuff around my childhood sexual abuser was still coming up, even though I’d been working on it for some years. I did some intergenerational work on him, and boof! Suddenly I saw him not only as the sad, pathetic man that he really was, but I also witnessed him with compassion for the first time. I never, ever, ever thought that would be possible. But it happened. 

Since then I have worked with clients using this protocol around their abusive parents, grandparents, husbands, wives – any abusive “others” in their lives. With the same astounding results. 

Healing intergenerational trauma IS the gateway to compassion. 

Author: Lucinda Gordon Lennox

Lucinda works at TRC London

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We are all vulnerable to feeling traumatised at the moment. All of us. This might just be about the collective trauma that we are experiencing, or perhaps our unresolved childhood trauma is also being triggered as a double whammy.

When our brain senses any type of danger, or threat, it immediately goes into ‘flight’ or ‘fight’. But we cannot run away from, nor fight, the current global pandemic. When our nervous system realises that these two responses are futile, the next trauma response we enter is ‘freeze’ or ‘flop’. Our internal system immobilises. In any trauma response state, our thinking brain unconsciously goes off-line and we find we can’t think straight.

When we are in ‘freeze’ or ‘flop’, we can dissociate. Many people are experiencing this feeling of ‘freeze’, three weeks into lockdown – even more than three weeks for many.

This could look like watching too much TV, constant snack eating through the day, under-eating, a feeling of ‘which foot do I put in front next’, not being able to think straight. We might feel as though we physically can’t move – we know we can, but we can’t at the same time. We are in deep procrastination. We feel low. We don’t want to reach out. We feel immobilised.

This is because the dorsal vagal nerve has been activated. (Dorsal = dissociate). If the dorsal vagal remains activated, then we will remain feeling stuck, or dissociated.

However, by activating our ventral vagal system the brain receives a message that we are ok.

Our ventral vagal network runs from the diaphragm up through the lungs, throat, neck and eyes to the brain.

To activate the ventral vagal network, we can do the following:

• Sit still and notice your body. Notice the stress and where it is.

• Take deep, deep breaths. Breathing in for a smaller count and breathing out for a longer count will activate the ventral vagal system.

• Do some humming or singing.

• Connect, connect, connect with people – on video call if possible. Making eye contact will help activate the ventral vagal.

• Try to limit your negative thoughts. Negative thoughts will activate the dorsal vagal again as you re-experience that sense of danger.

• Mobilise. Left foot right foot. Even if on the spot. This will help our left and right brain hemispheres work together again.

Yoga and meditation are also fantastic for this. Let’s consciously activate the ventral vagal. And, to help us further out of this stuck state, let’s get both brain hemispheres talking to each other again. We will feel so much better if we do.

The post Breathe, Sing, See, Be Seen, Walk, Diffusing feeling stuck with the ventral vagal appeared first on TRC | London | Midlands | Edinburgh | Riyadh.